The present invention relates generally to the field of information analytics tools, and methods for data mining and, more specifically, to using structured and unstructured information for the identification of experts for a given set of expertise.
In today's business consulting services world, often a team of consultants with different kinds of expertise must be quickly put together to respond to a potential client engagement or to address a client issue. Fast and dynamic team building capability is critical to the success of a business consulting service organization. To acquire such ability, one key component is to be able to identify an appropriate consulting team with appropriate expertise quickly. Fortunately, most of the consulting organizations maintain significant amounts of information in the form of documents, typically texts in a knowledge base which contain information, for example, regarding which consultants have been working on which kinds of projects. Such types of information, if mined properly, can give insights into who has what kinds of expertise.
Today, consulting organizations often cope with such issues via the word-of-mouth approach, which can be ad hoc, unreliable, and slow. A better approach is needed.